Minh-Ha T Pham
Biographic Data
| ID | 144847 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Minh-Ha T Pham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Minh-Ha T |
| FAMILY NAME | Pham |
| SIGNATURE | PHAM M T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pratt Institute |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A Story as Old as Cha Gio
In October 1952, Tran Xuong Kinh flew from Saigon to Washington, DC. A trained midwife and public health nurse, she was coming to the United States to spend the year learning American obstetrics techniques. “Though a bride of only four months,” Tran Xuong Kinh told a reporter, she “could not afford to pass up the study opportunity” (Eads 1952). Her year abroad would be funded by the Mutual Security Agency in Saigon where her husband was a clerk. …
Sociality at the End of the World
This collectively written essay meditates on sociality, mediation, death, and life during Pandemic 2020
China: Through the Looking Glass: Race, Property, and the Possessive Investment in White Feelings
How to Make a Mask: Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains
316 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Minh-Ha T. Pham “How to Make a Mask”: Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains Rosie the Seamstress. Also, Sally, Sylvia, Sharon, Susie/Suzie/Suzy the Seamstress. These are just some of the names given to, and adopted by, hundreds of thousands of (mostly) women and girls in the United States making face masks from their homes.1 They’re part of a loosely coordinated grassroots ef…
Racial Plagiarism and Fashion
This article attempts to chart a path out of the stultifying binary oppositions of “cultural appropriation” and “cultural appreciation” with regard to fashion and beauty forms and practices. “Racial plagiarism,” this essay argues, is a more precise analytic framework for understanding and critiquing the kinds of copying that happen in fashion and beauty contexts than either of the previous terms because it achieves a number of things: (1) it atte…
Feeling Appropriately
This essay examines the contradictory politics around the appropriation of cultural material in the fashion world. While fashion does not qualify for copyright protection, a common set of copynorms based on socially accepted racial constructions of authorship, originality, creative property, and cultural impropriety define, adjudicate, and support some fashion-copying practices while stigmatizing others. This essay begins with a historical perspe…
I Click and Post and Breathe, Waiting for Others to See What I See”: On #FeministSelfies, Outfit Photos, and Networked Vanity
This article critically examines the political uses and potential of “networked vanity.” While popular online practices of self-regard and self-promotion have been disparaged as examples of “digital narcissism”—a new culture of self-absorption wrought by social media—this article insists on a more historically and politically nuanced understanding of the politics and practices of self-composure. Analyzing the #feministselfie hashtag campaign that…
"Visualizing "The Misfit: Virtual Fitting Rooms and the Politics of Technology
This essay investigates the cultural and technological logics underpinning the design and operations of virtual fitting rooms. Virtual fitting rooms are full body-scanning technologies that look and function much the same as airport security scanners but, unlike their security counterparts, have been widely embraced by consumers. Virtual fitting rooms represent the latest technology in the fashion retail environment; at the same time, they are fu…
Archival intimacies: Participatory media and the fashion histories of US women of colour
This article discusses the critical and curatorial aims, materials and methods that underpin a digital fashion archive devoted to the histories of US women of colour called Of Another Fashion. It argues for the utility of participatory media in efforts to create not only new historical records of minoritized fashion histories but also new systems of record-keeping. Of Another Fashion does more than simply add to the history of US women’s fashion.…
Listening as a Labor of Love: Commerce, Community, and Little Saigon Radio
This article draws together communications and media studies with feminist theory and refugee scholarship to closely consider Vietnamese-American subject and community formations from the reference point of sound and audition. Specifically, it examines the ways in which institutionalized regimes of listening are configurations of power, the effects of which subtly but powerfully impact Vietnamese Americans' ordinary lives. Such regimes of listeni…
Paul Poiret's Magical Techno-Oriental Fashions (1911): Race, Clothing, and Virtuality in the Machine Age
This essay draws on Paul Poiret's Orientalist fashions and fancy-dress party as a case study for exploring the relations of race, aesthetics, and technology particularly as they cohere around techno-Orientalism. It situates Poiret's fashions within the history of techno-Orientalism to demonstrate clothing's significance as a virtual technology, as well as a technology of racial virtuality. Focusing on this early instance of techno-Orientalism in …
Susie Bubble is a Sign of The Times”: The embodiment of success in the Web 2.0 economy
This essay takes as its point of critical departure the digital stardom of Susanna Lau, aka Susie Bubble, the most recognizable and respected fashion blogger in the world, in order to consider the historical formation of success in the postmillennial digital economy. By examining Lau as an embodied sign rather than an exceptional figure of success, I am concerned with the technical, cultural, and economic forces that give shape to hegemonic notio…
A Success Worse Than Failure
A Success Worse Than Failure Minh-Ha T. Pham (bio) I already had failure on my mind when Timothy Yu's blog post "Has Asian American Studies Failed?" appeared on my Facebook news feed. That was around the same time I bought and began reading J. Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure after listening to a podcast of Halberstam on The Critical Lede. To paraphrase Halberstam, failure is a counterintuitive mode of knowing and doing that refuses the…
Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body
This essay closely considers the political limits and possibilities of fashion-themed blogs. Specifically, the author examines the ways in which such blogs are everyday cultural sites that are framed by and can potentially reframe neoliberal relations of culture, technology, and capitalism organized around the belief in the successful democratization of consumer markets and media. Thanks to liberalization policies and technological innovations in…
The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism
As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article appears as a companion essay to Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms" and offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite in th…
The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood
The author investigates how national and transnational discourses of multiculturalism operate on Hollywood’s representation of Asian bodies in two popular films, Rush Hour (1998), a conventionally produced Hollywood film set in post-riot Los Angeles, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a transnationally produced film set in nineteenth-century mythical China. Key words: “Asian invasion”“Chinese film studies in the West” Crouching Tiger Hidd…
Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body
This essay closely considers the political limits and possibilities of fashion-themed blogs. Specifically, the author examines the ways in which such blogs are everyday cultural sites that are framed by and can potentially reframe neoliberal relations of culture, technology, and capitalism organized around the belief in the successful democratization of consumer markets and media. Thanks to liberalization policies and technological innovations in…
I Click and Post and Breathe, Waiting for Others to See What I See”: On #FeministSelfies, Outfit Photos, and Networked Vanity
This article critically examines the political uses and potential of “networked vanity.” While popular online practices of self-regard and self-promotion have been disparaged as examples of “digital narcissism”—a new culture of self-absorption wrought by social media—this article insists on a more historically and politically nuanced understanding of the politics and practices of self-composure. Analyzing the #feministselfie hashtag campaign that…
Susie Bubble is a Sign of The Times”: The embodiment of success in the Web 2.0 economy
This essay takes as its point of critical departure the digital stardom of Susanna Lau, aka Susie Bubble, the most recognizable and respected fashion blogger in the world, in order to consider the historical formation of success in the postmillennial digital economy. By examining Lau as an embodied sign rather than an exceptional figure of success, I am concerned with the technical, cultural, and economic forces that give shape to hegemonic notio…
A Success Worse Than Failure
A Success Worse Than Failure Minh-Ha T. Pham (bio) I already had failure on my mind when Timothy Yu's blog post "Has Asian American Studies Failed?" appeared on my Facebook news feed. That was around the same time I bought and began reading J. Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure after listening to a podcast of Halberstam on The Critical Lede. To paraphrase Halberstam, failure is a counterintuitive mode of knowing and doing that refuses the…
The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism
As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article appears as a companion essay to Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms" and offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite in th…
"Visualizing "The Misfit: Virtual Fitting Rooms and the Politics of Technology
This essay investigates the cultural and technological logics underpinning the design and operations of virtual fitting rooms. Virtual fitting rooms are full body-scanning technologies that look and function much the same as airport security scanners but, unlike their security counterparts, have been widely embraced by consumers. Virtual fitting rooms represent the latest technology in the fashion retail environment; at the same time, they are fu…
The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood
The author investigates how national and transnational discourses of multiculturalism operate on Hollywood’s representation of Asian bodies in two popular films, Rush Hour (1998), a conventionally produced Hollywood film set in post-riot Los Angeles, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a transnationally produced film set in nineteenth-century mythical China. Key words: “Asian invasion”“Chinese film studies in the West” Crouching Tiger Hidd…
Paul Poiret's Magical Techno-Oriental Fashions (1911): Race, Clothing, and Virtuality in the Machine Age
This essay draws on Paul Poiret's Orientalist fashions and fancy-dress party as a case study for exploring the relations of race, aesthetics, and technology particularly as they cohere around techno-Orientalism. It situates Poiret's fashions within the history of techno-Orientalism to demonstrate clothing's significance as a virtual technology, as well as a technology of racial virtuality. Focusing on this early instance of techno-Orientalism in …
The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood
The author investigates how national and transnational discourses of multiculturalism operate on Hollywood’s representation of Asian bodies in two popular films, Rush Hour (1998), a conventionally produced Hollywood film set in post-riot Los Angeles, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a transnationally produced film set in nineteenth-century mythical China. Key words: “Asian invasion”“Chinese film studies in the West” Crouching Tiger Hidd…
Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body
This essay closely considers the political limits and possibilities of fashion-themed blogs. Specifically, the author examines the ways in which such blogs are everyday cultural sites that are framed by and can potentially reframe neoliberal relations of culture, technology, and capitalism organized around the belief in the successful democratization of consumer markets and media. Thanks to liberalization policies and technological innovations in…
The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism
As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article appears as a companion essay to Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms" and offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite in th…
Susie Bubble is a Sign of The Times”: The embodiment of success in the Web 2.0 economy
This essay takes as its point of critical departure the digital stardom of Susanna Lau, aka Susie Bubble, the most recognizable and respected fashion blogger in the world, in order to consider the historical formation of success in the postmillennial digital economy. By examining Lau as an embodied sign rather than an exceptional figure of success, I am concerned with the technical, cultural, and economic forces that give shape to hegemonic notio…
A Success Worse Than Failure
A Success Worse Than Failure Minh-Ha T. Pham (bio) I already had failure on my mind when Timothy Yu's blog post "Has Asian American Studies Failed?" appeared on my Facebook news feed. That was around the same time I bought and began reading J. Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure after listening to a podcast of Halberstam on The Critical Lede. To paraphrase Halberstam, failure is a counterintuitive mode of knowing and doing that refuses the…
Listening as a Labor of Love: Commerce, Community, and Little Saigon Radio
This article draws together communications and media studies with feminist theory and refugee scholarship to closely consider Vietnamese-American subject and community formations from the reference point of sound and audition. Specifically, it examines the ways in which institutionalized regimes of listening are configurations of power, the effects of which subtly but powerfully impact Vietnamese Americans' ordinary lives. Such regimes of listeni…
Paul Poiret's Magical Techno-Oriental Fashions (1911): Race, Clothing, and Virtuality in the Machine Age
This essay draws on Paul Poiret's Orientalist fashions and fancy-dress party as a case study for exploring the relations of race, aesthetics, and technology particularly as they cohere around techno-Orientalism. It situates Poiret's fashions within the history of techno-Orientalism to demonstrate clothing's significance as a virtual technology, as well as a technology of racial virtuality. Focusing on this early instance of techno-Orientalism in …
Archival intimacies: Participatory media and the fashion histories of US women of colour
This article discusses the critical and curatorial aims, materials and methods that underpin a digital fashion archive devoted to the histories of US women of colour called Of Another Fashion. It argues for the utility of participatory media in efforts to create not only new historical records of minoritized fashion histories but also new systems of record-keeping. Of Another Fashion does more than simply add to the history of US women’s fashion.…
I Click and Post and Breathe, Waiting for Others to See What I See”: On #FeministSelfies, Outfit Photos, and Networked Vanity
This article critically examines the political uses and potential of “networked vanity.” While popular online practices of self-regard and self-promotion have been disparaged as examples of “digital narcissism”—a new culture of self-absorption wrought by social media—this article insists on a more historically and politically nuanced understanding of the politics and practices of self-composure. Analyzing the #feministselfie hashtag campaign that…
"Visualizing "The Misfit: Virtual Fitting Rooms and the Politics of Technology
This essay investigates the cultural and technological logics underpinning the design and operations of virtual fitting rooms. Virtual fitting rooms are full body-scanning technologies that look and function much the same as airport security scanners but, unlike their security counterparts, have been widely embraced by consumers. Virtual fitting rooms represent the latest technology in the fashion retail environment; at the same time, they are fu…
Feeling Appropriately
This essay examines the contradictory politics around the appropriation of cultural material in the fashion world. While fashion does not qualify for copyright protection, a common set of copynorms based on socially accepted racial constructions of authorship, originality, creative property, and cultural impropriety define, adjudicate, and support some fashion-copying practices while stigmatizing others. This essay begins with a historical perspe…
Racial Plagiarism and Fashion
This article attempts to chart a path out of the stultifying binary oppositions of “cultural appropriation” and “cultural appreciation” with regard to fashion and beauty forms and practices. “Racial plagiarism,” this essay argues, is a more precise analytic framework for understanding and critiquing the kinds of copying that happen in fashion and beauty contexts than either of the previous terms because it achieves a number of things: (1) it atte…
China: Through the Looking Glass: Race, Property, and the Possessive Investment in White Feelings
How to Make a Mask: Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains
316 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Minh-Ha T. Pham “How to Make a Mask”: Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains Rosie the Seamstress. Also, Sally, Sylvia, Sharon, Susie/Suzie/Suzy the Seamstress. These are just some of the names given to, and adopted by, hundreds of thousands of (mostly) women and girls in the United States making face masks from their homes.1 They’re part of a loosely coordinated grassroots ef…
Sociality at the End of the World
This collectively written essay meditates on sociality, mediation, death, and life during Pandemic 2020
A Story as Old as Cha Gio
In October 1952, Tran Xuong Kinh flew from Saigon to Washington, DC. A trained midwife and public health nurse, she was coming to the United States to spend the year learning American obstetrics techniques. “Though a bride of only four months,” Tran Xuong Kinh told a reporter, she “could not afford to pass up the study opportunity” (Eads 1952). Her year abroad would be funded by the Mutual Security Agency in Saigon where her husband was a clerk. …
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Fashion and Cultural Textiles (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Crafts, Textile, and Design (5 works) · Law (5 works)